1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to semiconductor manufacturing systems and, more particularly, to a method and apparatus for managing recipes used to control semiconductor manufacturing equipment.
2. Description of the Related Art
Semiconductor manufacturing equipment is often controlled by a recipe, or process program, that precisely controls its operation during the manufacturing process. These recipes are crucial to the proper manufacturing of product, so it is highly desirable that known good recipes be kept in a secured, version-controlled repository. Such a repository is called a recipe manager.
The manufacturing execution system (MES) is the centralized control for moving semiconductor wafers through the various processing tools. The MES and the recipe manager coordinate the use of various recipes to provide instructions to the processing tools. Keeping the MES and the recipe manager synchronized manually is a daunting task and transcription errors resulting from manual synchronization can be extremely costly. The initial setup of a recipe manager is also critically important but is long, tedious, and error-prone. For example, when a new product is added to the MES, all of the process steps on that product's process will need to be entered into the recipe manager.
Some recipe managers have attempted to implement a “tap” mechanism to facilitate the synchronization of recipes. While such a system can be implemented, it requires a lengthy initialization step when the tap is first activated to obtain the starting set of data. Moreover, taps generally require extensive modification of the specific recipe management software and the tap is useless in any other context. There is no general means for tapping an MES that works for many customers.
There is a need for a simple and reliable method and apparatus for initializing, auditing and reconciling changes in context data between the manufacturing execution system and the recipe manager.